High Dive Teaching

David is talking us through creating a coherent curriculum that sticks. It rounds off a day of thinking about improving retention of knowledge and skills. We start by discussing some questions about how we prep students for their exams – do we work harder than them?

He worked with a colleague to identify the reasons why the results, though good, had plateaued. Was it to do with the structure of the curriculum? They came up with a few more questions to unpick this –

He is quick to stress that their process was about making learning stick better, rather than memorising for exams. This is important, because workload is increasing and the amount of time available for catch up and extra sessions is receding and we’re in danger of becoming a school with a school – one school finishes at 3 and another begins.

We look at schemes of work and learning that we’ve brought with us. Unfortunately I ran out of I time to print anything so have nothing to share. There’s some discussion about hammering threshold concepts in year 7 maths – threshold concepts again!

We hear about the work of Robert Bjork on memory – retrieval strength versus storage strength. We should be aiming for high storage, high retrieval in the classroom, but mapping that through our curriculum to ensure it is built in from the very start. David demonstrates this by getting us to demonstrate our schema on Hawaii – things we remember and have picked up about Hawaii.

Bjork talks of desirable difficulties which help people to develop these schema. Old knowledge creates foundation for new knowledge, but is that well mapped in our curriculum? We discuss this, with some consideration about whether Gove was right to reorganise the history curriculum chronologically from KS1 (not really – there’s too much in it, imo).

We think about testing knowledge retrieval. The act of testing improves retrieval strength which in turn improves storage strength. 61% remembered after retesting compared to 40% from relearning. Revising should not just be rereading! To ensure there’s not death by testing, questions must fit on one slide with answers on the next slide. Also use multiple choice questions – David’s department pre-test all their students to inform planning and give them a second chance at being successful on the test.

This testing and recapping was built into the curriculum so that students are constantly challenged to remember, which has hugely improved retrieval and retention.

We discuss unit tests vs cumulative tests. Unit tests help to show progress but don’t help them to recap prior learning. There’s a good case to be made here for mixing topics in a test, although this doesn’t really fit with how our GCSE works so will have to think about how it might look in practice.

David has added an extra column to the schemes of work to map back to prior learning. I’ve been reworking ours this year and I am really taken with this idea. We share ideas about how we can do these things in our own departments.

David finishes by explaining that instead of reteaching the content, they retest and use a spreadsheet with question level analysis to map where students are succeeding. This is shown by class as well as student, so that seas of best practice are easily visible and can be shared.

Watkin is taking about what makes good learning in History. He starts with some video clips of students sharing their knowledge. J knows loads and loads, but his written work isn’t good. R can structure a really good written answer but she doesn’t have that knowledge and framework. A has all the right bits, but it doesn’t seem to work – the written work doesn’t come out quite right: “broken clocks” who have all the right pieces but can’t assemble. And then L, whose literacy issues make history almost impossible.

First – chronological framework. We create our own timeline: Neal gives this to students and puts it up, in their order, and then they adjust it as the acquire more knowledge. There’s a song to the tune of heads, shoulders etc, to help them to crack this chronological framework.

They also have monster questions that last for the whole year, which seems similar to the long survey units we’ve been working on in year 7 and 8. His big question for the Middle Ages is, if the Renaissance was a rebirth of Ancient ideas, was the Middle Ages a complete waste of time? Love this.

Secondly – keeping knowledge alive. This involves a lot of long term planning, connecting up different bits of knowledge through the course: marine corps knowledge – leave no topic behind. Neal has activities scattered around every so often, and when he says “Gorilla history” they have to grab an activity and do it. These are all short tasks that relate back to previous topics. Younger kids love it but GCSE students hate it because they think it interrupts their flow of learning. Neal has shared some of the research behind it with them to convince them that, thought counter intuitive, it is valuable.

Something else they use is a random epic poem plot line generator, which he made subject specific to Saxon leadership. This uses a dice to help students work through the poem lines. He refers back to it later on when they look at Harold preparing for the Battle of Hastings, creating an extra layer of context to help students understand the impact of Saxon culture.

Big history map: Neal thought about how to create the monster historian, and subject knowledge is at the core of it, with things like historiography and source skills hanging off this. He gives them a couple of different historians’ accounts on a timeline – traditional and modern – and has students consider how those historians came up with their opinions, showing that different evidence leads to different outcome. Students then predict what the opinions will be at the same times for a different question.

This helps with big history mapping.

Neal is also trying to do the same with skills.

Neal reminds us of the TOWER model, that I have been using to a greater or lesser degree, with much success, since TLAB13. We have a go at an argument tunnel for the walk part, which I have used for TOWER writing before, but haven’t used for far too long! It is fun to have a go at this myself. Resolving to do this again across at least ks3 by the end of the year.

We do some analogy analysis, which is about getting students to create an analogy for various things they are studying.

It is remarkably difficult to think of an analogy for good history! We start by thinking about what the topic is actually about in order to come up with a reasonable analogy, but time runs out too quickly for us to come up with much.

Carr is talking about the relationship between knowledge, progress and assessment in History.

She shares the department’s discussion on models of progression. The departmental vision: inspired by the past, learning by enquiry, winning the arguments. They have been reflecting on the role of knowledge: what do the students need to know, and why? Working memory and cognitive load. Whether second order concepts are a type of knowledge we draw on. What frameworks do history teachers have in their heads that students don’t? (This chimes in with a bit of recent reading I’ve been doing with threshold concepts).

We read a section of Paxman’s book on WW1 and consider what knowledge you need to understand it – government structures, geographical knowledge etc. We do the same with a Schama extract and consider how sense of period knowledge applies here.

We then look at some (excellent) student work and consider what wider knowledge students have needed to write these people – one has been able to make links between the British Empire and other empires she has studied, while a year 7 student has used some very detailed knowledge of Anglo-Saxon slavery and the finer points of feudalism to show change over time in Norman Britain. In our table discussion, Neal says that using historiography has forced students to look more closely at the evidence, to judge interpretations.

We think of our own enquiries and what knowledge is needed. Ericha shares details of her “Roosevelt: dictator?” scheme and we list the things students need to know to be successful. Then this activity –

Carr then explains how they have tried to build more knowledge retention into their work – timelines, quizzes, overview and themes, revising and revisiting topics, themes, concepts etc. This is partly informed by neuroscience and books such as Make It Stick.

We look at some examples of timelines in helping students to fit together all the chronological knowledge they are acquiring. My favourite is for y8 starting a unit on Islamic Spain – they are given a timeline with key events from that study on it, and asked to add contemporary events from Britain.

Carr says that the thinking continued – if knowledge is that important, how can we assess it? They’re aiming for a mixed constitution – assessing overall performance by taking a range of samples of what students know and can do.

These are backed up with extremely detailed mark schemes for the assessed pieces of work. They help to define the gold standard for very specific tasks, in a very task-specific way. We look at some examples of end of year tests and responses to them to wrap up a very thought-provoking session.

I love Blakemore’s sessions! This year’s theme is “All in the mind” so she is ideal to open the conference.

She begins by talking about adolescence as a concept, suggesting that some people think it is a modern construct; however there is clearly adolescence in other species: for example, rats have a few days of adolescence during which they demonstrate other behaviours, like drinking more alcohol when with other adolescent rats.

Typical adolescent behaviour, like risk taking and per influence, has been the subject of many lab experiments over the years, partly because adolescents are more likely to die as a result of their own rims taking than any other age group, thanks to a peak in risk taking at this age. Blakemore shares Larry Steinberg’s work with a driving video simulation to show that peer influence has a significant impact on risk taking.

We look at the results of social exclusion lab experiments that show that adolescents have a significant mood drop when they are not included by their peers. We then hear about a study of how risk perception changes according to social influence, which showed that young adolescents are more heavily influenced by other teenagers than they are by adults, since they changed their risk rating more when presented with data from other teenagers than from adults. Blakemore tells us about studies in the US where researchers identified the coolest kid in the the class and bombarded them with negative press about smoking, etc, and tracked changing attitudes across the class, adjusting social norms. This is great, and something I think most secondary teachers would recognise from their own classrooms. GCSE classes often seem to pull towards the attitude and ability of the most popular students in it, I have observed.

We then look at details of grey matter development in the brain throughout adolescence. I have shared bits of this with a lot of students since hearing it first last year. Frontal grey matter decreases through adolescence, which suggests that the brain is being shaped and fine tuned by the environment that child is in. Children have vastly more synapses connecting their neurons until they reach adolescence. Synaptic pruning then takes place, and this is determined by what synapses are being used, which is influenced by environment, culture etc.

Blakemore shares the football match picture with the missed goal, pointing out that we can identify how these people feel just by looking at them (something I point out to my students when we do source inferences). This skill develops extremely early.

Blakemore finishes by sharing her Science23 website – more investigations needed here!